CRO

Worldwide Clinical Trials picks Medidata for site payments after 18-month search

Medidata is making new conquests in the clinical trial world, as it has inked a deal to manage site payments for Worldwide Clinical Trials.

The contract came after Worldwide spent 18 months going through all leading site payments providers. What took Worldwide so long, and why Medidata? Worldwide CFO Anthony Doyle laid it out for us in an emailed interview.

“We set out to rethink and innovate one of the major burdens sponsors have with all clinical trials: getting paid on time,” Doyle said. “We considered process, regulatory and technology challenges, and determined our best path forward was to implement a centralized, integrated, dynamic payment system—one that can accommodate midstream changes, multiple site payees, easily accessible consolidated and aggregated reporting—including government reporting requirements.”

Worldwide then went through its options and conducted an in-depth return-on-investment analysis, and decided that Medidata Payments can “reimburse sites as quickly and accurately as possible,” Doyle said.

Medidata touts its cloud-based Payments product as the industry’s only global site payment technology powered by electronic data capture (EDC). It can automatically start payment calculation once a site’s work is complete and disburse payments directly to the site’s bank account.

Worldwide said it will apply the system to studies in a variety of therapeutic areas it excels in, including neuroscience, cardiovascular diseases, immune-mediated inflammatory disorders and rare diseases.

The payments solution is fully compatible with Medidata’s EDC and clinical data management system Medidata Rave, which Worldwide has already gained accreditation to use, along with two other Medidata products—medical coding software Coder and source document verification method Targeted SDV.

Through its cloud-based services for clinical research, Medidata has been extending its reach quickly, having formed relationships with 850 biopharma and medtech companies, academic research organizations and CROs. Currently, 20 clients are using Payments in studies in 51 countries, according to Medidata.

So far this year, the New York-based clinical software tech firm has either expanded existing collaborations or formed new ones with the like of Celgene, Karyopharm, UCB, INC Research and WuXi AppTec, etc., and added eConsent to its portfolio via the acquisition of Mytrus. The company’s stock price has also been on an apparent upward trend this year, rising from around $50 a share to over $80 recently.